Even if you were having a great time in 1991 (I sure was), you should resolutely refuse that year any reverent nostalgia. That halcyon year is gone for ever, yes, but its legacy is alive and also unstable. 1991 was the heyday of cyber-counterculture. 1991 was the triumph of neo-liberalism over the corpse of Communism. 1991 was the flushed, tubercular onset of the dotcom collapse. 1991 was when a feral oil market destroyed a new world order. 1991 was all of those things at one time. The past takes its meaning from what we do today, and 1991 can be construed – just as 2031 can.
1991 hasn’t yet been through the full, awful rigour of historical revisionism – it’s not like the year 1789, chewed to mulch by generations of ideological stakeholders. But the only fate that history offers is to be re-interpreted; re-cast as retrodiction, more and more wildly as its constituent elements vanish, as its eyewitnesses leave us, as the past’s quotidian aspects become remote, romantic, fantastic ...
Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people.
2031, by contrast, has the common 21st-century population: huge and old. Back in 1991, only Florida, Japan and Italy had that solid, permanent preponderance of the elderly that is common everywhere in 2031. This vast social transition changed everything and created all kinds of financial and political mayhem, but it was nothing much to get excited about, because there was nothing much to be done about it. Nobody ever gets less old...
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